Japan Musing #3: Subway

Musing #3

Four escalator lanes at Oedo Line’s Shinjuku-Nishiguchi station.

For some reason, I can’t help but picture one of them as a slide. I wonder…

4-Lane Escalator in Shinjuku

By the Numbers: Tokyo City Hall vs. San Jose City Hall

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building vs. my lil’ old (by comparison) hometown San Jose City Hall. Some interesting numbers in there.

San Jose City Hall (top) and Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (bottom) - 2010, P. Lydon

Tokyo City Hall

Floors: 48
Square Meters of Floorspace: 400,000
Employees: 13,000
Citizens served: 13 million
Cost:  1 Billion USD

San Jose City Hall

Floors: 18
Square Meters of Floorspace: 46,000
Employees: 1,950
Citizens served: 1 million
Cost: 382 Million USD

San Jose City Hall (top) and Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (bottom)lil

Japan Musing #1: In Shinjuku

Looking up, I see four huge pillars. But what do they support? Rising to heights that one can’t quite fathom from his ant-like position, attempting to imagine, one by one, the thousands of people at work within the windows.  I’ve almost never had the desire to be up there, and I’m not. Today. But these moments are the constant reminders that I could and might. Might be wondering “why?”, in some forgotten part of this mass of blood vessels, neurons, and glial cells atop my shoulders, yet unable to access or translate that mental wisp into something that incites one into physical action.

The tall buildings are magnificent to view, but what of the things that go on inside them? Are they just as magnificent, or decidedly less so?

Skyscrapers in Shinjuku, Tokyo (2010, P. Lydon)

Our quest for survival in turn dictates our suffering through life… but only if we follow the terms which neither we the individual, nor our creator did create.